Sequoia, KPCB, Accel & Benchmark Capital

Here is some info about 4 big names of the VC industry and the companies they have funded:

Sequoia Capital
Oracle
Yahoo!
Electronic Arts
Apple
Google
YouTube
LinkedIn
Cisco Systems
Paypal
…

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Digital Chocolate
Friendster
Google
Blue Nile (see my post)
Palm
Ciena
E.Piphany
Juniper Networks
iVillage
VeriSign
Amazon
Citrix Systems
Netscape
Macromedia
AOL
Flextronics
Electronic Arts
Symantec
Sun Microsystems
…

Accel
UUNETReal.com
Macromedia
Brightmail
ComScore
Facebook
Netvibes
Synopsys
Walmart.com
Weeworld
...

Benchmark Capital
1-800-Flowers
AOL
Bebo
Betfair
E-Loan
eBay
Friendster
JAMDAT

Juniper Networks

Matrix Semiconductor
Metacafe
MySQL
Palm Computing
Pageflakes
Red Hat Software
Shopping.com
Synopsys
WeeWorld
Yoox

...

The European adventure of Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners

I just read an article on Real Deals, a famous Private Equity and Venture Capital magazine, about two major Venture Capital funds: Accel and Benchmark Capital.
The scope of this article is to describe these two funds that arrived in Europe in 2000, just before the bubble burst, and decided to stay in Europe. Actually, as mentioned the article “they are the only US venture capitalists not to have beaten a hasty retreat”. For them, Europe is “an under-served venture capital market relative to the number of entrepreneurs and technologies in development”. Therefore, considering the European market as a real opportunity, you need to have a local base (ie London).

What strikes me in this excellent article is that Benchmark and Accel do not have an exit track record in Europe: “the big home runs, on which their model is predicated, are yet to come”.

Let’s hope that these home runs will come shortly in order to confirm that the European technological market exists and can create a lot of value!